Quote

We shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life of the majority.

Thomas Jefferson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thomas Jefferson
Age: 83 †
Born: 1743
Born: April 2
Died: 1826
Died: July 4
3Rd U.S. President
Archaeologist
Architect
Cryptographer
Diplomat
Farmer
Inventor
Jurist
Lawyer
Philosopher
Politician
Slaveholder
President Jefferson
T. Jefferson
Politics
Generation
Morally
Within
Periods
Posterity
May
Majority
Liberalism
Unauthorized
Life
Pay
Bound
Saddle
Generations
Bounds
Saddles
Shall
Period
Deemed
Economy
Debt
Debts
Wisdom
Consider
Consequently

More quotes by Thomas Jefferson

Image
History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
Our duty to ourselves, to posterity, and to mankind, call on us by every motive which is sacred or honorable, to watch over the safety of our beloved country during the troubles which agitate and convulse the residue of the world, and to sacrifice to that all personal and local considerations.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
The equal rights of man and the happiness of every individual are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
To make us one nation as to foreign concerns, and keep us distinct in Domestic ones gives the outline of the proper division of powers between the general [national] and particular [state] governments.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
Of all the cankers of human happiness none corrodes with so silent, yet so baneful an influence, as indolence.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
The mass of the citizens is the safest depositary of their own rights.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
Error is to be pitied and pardoned: it is the weakness of human nature. But vice is a foul blemish, not pardonable in any character.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
[Emigrants] will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth or, if able to throw off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
The happiness of society depends so much on preventing party spirit from infecting the common intercourse of life, that nothing should be spared to harmonize and amalgamate the two parties in social circles.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
The same political parties which now agitiate the US have existed through all time. And in fact the terms of whig and tory belong to natural as well as to civil history. They denote the temper and constitution and mind of different individuals.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
Where strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be attended to. . . . But where, by small grammatical negligences, the energy of an idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
If the book be false in its facts, disprove them if false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for God's sake, let us freely hear both sides, if we choose.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
Money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
The law for religious freedom... [has]put down the aristocracy of the clergy and restored to the citizen the freedom of the mind.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
I feel... an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may, at length, reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
Force cannot give right.
Thomas Jefferson
Image
When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through, it is best to make up our minds to it, meet it with firmness, and accommodate everything to it in the best way practicable. This lessens the evil while fretting and fuming only serves to increase your own torments.
Thomas Jefferson